home  |  book  |

The Race To Unimportance Hugo on Genius

print view

Conservatives and the Creative Impulse: Part I

by Christopher Chantrill
February 12, 2005 at 1:17 am

|

WHAT A DIFFERENCE a year makes! A year ago Americans were digesting the rude, crude Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” of Janet Jackson. This year, twenty-something guys are sniggering over the Go Daddy Girl’s troublesome bra-strap. A year ago America got hit in the solar plexus with mindless “challenge” art. This year we got a satirical $2.5 commercial from GoDaddy.com that sashayed provocatively up to the line but not over it. (Warning: parental discretion advised here)

It is vital for conservatives to understand the difference between the bared breast and the broken bra-strap. By understanding the difference and acting on it we can win the culture war.

Raunchy TV goes back to the Sixties, “do your own thing,” and the so-called creative revolution in advertising. It made a cult out of transgression, “challenging” the conformist society of the Fifties and the Organization Man. But the cult of creativity goes back at least to Freud at the turn of the twentieth century. That’s why you’ll still hear artists and writers witnessing to the world how the scales fell off their eyes when they read Freud.

Freud’s psychology may seem to conservative Americans as a sudden, irrational outburst from Teutonic Europe. But his psychology develops naturally out of Kant’s conscious ego, Fichte’s impulsive ego, Hegel’s stage theory of consciousness, and Schopenhauer’s theory of repression. The key link in this chain is Fichte, because he isolates the key factor in human knowledge: humans.

How does knowledge come into the world? Descartes thought that knowledge came from a scientist making logical inferences from known indubitable facts to a necessary theory. But Fichte showed that facts are dead, and dead men tell no tales. It is the free imaginative act of the scientist that breathes life into facts to create a new theory. And that act comes from impulse: “All our thought is founded on our impulses,” he wrote. It was surely Fichte that gave the great generation from Einstein to Heisenberg permission to think the unthinkable and shock the world with modern physics.

Of course Fichte’s discovery applied not just to scientists. Artists and writers were delighted to think the unthinkable—and do it too. A century later, Freud taught the young artist to regard his dreams as a holy font of impulse welling up from the unconscious id and to fear that repressing it would lead to neurosis.

For the middle-class conservative, this all seems crazy. Without the restraint of rules, the impulsive ego becomes an unguided missile. The names of Hitler, Mao, and Castro come to mind. Rules and traditions are not repression, but society’s wise defense-in-depth against unrestrained egos and their destructiveness. And so conservatives brush Freud aside.

But rejecting German psychology means keeping on stage the psychology of Locke and Hume, an ageing act, any German will tell you, that lost its top billing when Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumber over 200 years ago. Locke and Hume laid the foundations of our miraculous constitution and gave a philosophical foundation to the Protestant culture of self-government that was the glory of colonial New England. But Kant cut the ground out from under them with a startling idea that resolved an argument that went back to Plato and Aristotle: Was the real world the ultimate reality, or was it the world of ideas? Kant said, simply, that we couldn’t tell. All we can know are appearances; we can never know “things-in-themselves.”

The Germans should have run the British empiricists off the stage there and then, but they didn’t. Instead they had a wardrobe malfunction. The slipup was made by Fichte and extends through Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre and all their postmodern adepts in a thousand universities, arts communities, and movies—and by cultural osmosis down to third-rate talents like Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. As we have seen, they conceived of the genius as an impulsive ego beyond the rules. “No more rules… Genius conjures up rather than learns,” said Victor Hugo. It is the great achievement of the postmodernists to have added a corollary to this theorem. Rules are a mask for power.

It is precisely on this that conservatives take their stand athwart history, yelling “Stop!” And they are right. Rules are not a mask for power, but a defense-in-depth against power.

Conservatives need something more than a stop sign. They need a model of consciousness that can dish Fichte, Freud, and the cult of the transgressive genius by offering something better. It would extol instead the creative ego, the hero that transcends and includes the rules that have served us so well instead of trashing them.

Can conservatives create such a theory? Or perhaps has someone already developed one? Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of “Conservative and the Creative Impulse.”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

 

 TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

presented by Christopher Chantrill

 •  Contact